How to Make a Final Exam Study Schedule - College Info Geek

Key Takeaways

hey what's up guys so finals are upon us I know some of you guys have already started finals some of you guys have them coming very soon and for that reason I'm releasing this video early this week so hopefully it can help you in creating a study schedule and what I want to do specifically in this video is actually give you a look at one of the schedules I built for my final exams as a student but before that I've got some general tips and principles that you can use to build your study schedule so hopefully you can frontload all the work and plan effectively and that will help you study in the most efficient way possible through the weeks leading up to finals and through that actual finals week now I think there are some guiding principles that you should keep in mind when you're building your study schedule these will help you make it as effective as possible and number one you want to minimize the time that you spend procrastinating and maximize the time you spend studying effectively you also want to study the most important material in the right order and lastly you want to manage your energy and stress levels so with those guiding principles in mind the first step to building your study schedule is to figure out when your finals are and I have to mention because I remember my school did not have final exams during the actual class periods that I went to instead they had this convoluted formula algorithm thing where you had to go on the website and figure out the first time of the week when your first class met and that would correlate to some other exam date probably in the evening when you want to be eating dinner and I can only assume they like put a bunch of dice into a yatsi jar and that's how they figured it out once you know those exam dates and you're sure you're not going to be showing up to an empty classroom an hour after the exam ends which by the way Pro tip is the easiest way to to fail an exam then what you want to do is arm yourself with as much knowledge as possible to help you build that study schedule I'm talking the format of your exams multiple choice true false essay style what have you the material that's going to cover is it comprehensive or is it only going to cover what you had since the last exam and how much of your grade this exam is going to count for you also want to keep in mind any homework assignments or projects that you have due during the exam week and speaking of that it's good to step back for a second and ask yourself what kind of person am I when it comes to scheduling study sessions and project and homework sessions maybe you're the kind of person who likes to intersperse the project work with the study sessions to kind of give your brain a break and a change of pace or maybe you're like me and you do better to put all of your project and homework work on one day and then put all the study sessions on another day and keep it all compartmentalized so your brain is in the right frame of reference on each day after that take stock of your resources make sure you have the syllabi all the course materials handouts from your professors notes and textbooks and at this point your number one priority is to assess your knowledge for each class try to figure out exactly what's going to be covered on each exam and figure out where the gaps in your knowledge are one final step before we begin actually scheduling things and that is to prioritize your classes and figure out which ones you should study for the most and in what order you want to study them and to figure that out you want to figure out which classes are most important there are a few different factors that go into this one of them is which finals count for the most points the percentage of your grade and those are usually listed on your syllabuses syllabi you also want to take into account your current standing in each class if in one class you have a solid a then maybe your final performance is not going to influence that grade too much and maybe in another class you're kind of on the precipice between one grade and another and that final will really count for what your actual grade is going to be once you've taken those factors into account you can compare them against the knowledge gaps you identified earlier to figure out which classes are the most important and which classes you're struggling the most in and those two pieces of information together will help you more accurately prioritize how long you should study for each class and in what order you should schedule your sessions all right now we are ready to begin scheduling so in the book had a study for college which was written by the Cornell University Professor Walter Pac the same guy who made the Cornell notetaking system he recommends creating something called a home stretch schedule for finals this is basically a schedule much like your normal weekly schedule but like Ultra detailed you want to put lots of things in there like your meal times all little tasks you have to take care of and this can help you figure out where the gaps are that you can schedule study sessions for your finals one thing I'd like to add to this is you should try to group and batch your small tasks into as few sessions as possible that way you'll have more uninterrupted blocks of time where you can actually get studying done now personally my tool of choice for this has always been Google Calendar I've been using it ever since I was a freshman and if you're more of a paper planner person that's more your speed that's totally cool but at this point in the video I want to go into Google Calendar and show you one of my own finals week study schedules all right so here we are looking at the week of April 25th to May 1st 2010 this was the second semester of my freshman year and this is the week leading up to finals which I have uh my exams scheduled in blue to let me know when they are and I've looked up when they're scheduled so let's look at this week leading up to finals uh it's looking pretty crazy right now so I'm going to turn off the homework and the other and work so this is my class schedule I've got I believe six classes here two of them meet only once per week so they're pretty easy and then I've got a Java review session that I remember was like a whole classwide thing the professor was running definitely wanted to be at that and also adding in my work I worked probably 20 hours a week or more basically all through college so I was balancing that with classes and actually this semester there were more than 20 hours a week because I had training sessions for the summer job I was training for so I had to balance all of this and uh because it was so hectic I wanted to make sure that I was getting my meals and workouts in so that on my other calendar I had lunches which were usually very quick and then dinners which were with friends and I wanted to make sure those were longer because I really valued them also had gym times to make sure that I was staying healthy during this studying week so as pox says in the book about the home stretch schedule I now can identify gaps of time where I can start scheduling my study sessions and that's exactly what I did what I want to point out here is I have finishing my homework on one day I've got one other homework on this other day and then when reviewing I tried to be very specific about what I was going to review remember what we talked about with the uh Parkinson's law work expands to fill the time allotted for it you shouldn't show up to the library and just tell yourself I'm going to study for 5 hours because you're going to end up just working on one thing for five straight hours instead keep Parkinson's lot in mind and also realize that your brain's efficiency is going to take a dive after 25 to 30 minutes so you can try scheduling your study sessions with the Pomodoro Technique in mind and try to accomplish a specific set of things within 25 or 30 minutes and then give yourself a small break that being said let's go over to the finals week and you can see I have my finals labeled in blue so I know exactly when they are and I just have work there were no classes during that week so I didn't schedule things here because I was not perfect as a student but you could keep scheduling things and being efficient up until your finals are done and then you are home free all right so to round this video out I've got three final quick tips that can hopefully make your study schedule even better and the first one is to pay attention to the es and flows of your body's energy levels throughout the day for instance maybe your energy levels are highest in the morning in which case maybe you should schedule your hardest study session for then but also make sure you're going to bed early enough that you're well rested to get up early or maybe you're night owl and you find that you're really really focused at night in which case don't worry about getting up too early number two remember that the performance of your brain is connected to the well-being of your body so schedule time to exercise and schedule time for breaks so you can reduce stress and lastly ask for help when you need it be sure to challenge yourself and try to work through problems but if you really get stuck asking your professor can accelerate your review process and save you a lot of stress if you've seen my video with tips on starting a new semester you'll remember I had a hidden calendar with my professor's office hours on it and I could activate it at any time to figure out when a certain Professor would be in the office and when I could go get help so that's it for this video if you check the companion article for it you'll find screenshots of my Google Calendar in case you want to use it as a guide for your own otherwise if you like this video give it a like to support this Channel and I will see you in next week's video hey guys thanks so much for watching this video If you want to get new tips every week on being a more effective student you can click that big red subscribe button right there and also if you want to get a free copy of my book on earning better grades click the picture of the book and I'll send you one if you want to see that companion blog post click the orang button right there and if you missed last week's video we talked about a brain hack of sorts for performing better on your exams so check it out if you haven't seen it lastly I'm Tom frankly on Instagram or Twitter if you want to connect or you can leave a comment down below